One of the most far-reaching ambitions of the Deep Carbon Observatory is an omnibus modeling effort to integrate knowledge about the movements and transformations of carbon, an effort spanning the core, mantle, and crust over the four and a half billion years since Earth’s formation. The prospect is daunting, ranging from molecular processes to lava flows, to continent formation, from diamonds, to microbes, to billions of tons of sinking sediments, from temperatures conducive for life to those that melt iron, from pressures allowing delicate films to form to those that crush carbon into diamonds, and from momentary events to those so slow that in comparison the adjective “glacial” describes the blink of an eye. In addition, the temptation to model the evolution of the planet, including the emergence of life and the biosphere, proved irresistible.  Funds from this grant provide continued support to the Deep Carbon Observatory Modeling Forum in its efforts to provide an intellectual framework for the DCO’s modelers and to create key component models to speed and integrate their work. Over the next 21 months, the project team will continue its work developing open access platforms and tools for the modeling and visualization of deep carbon. Funded activities include software development, participation in the wider DCO’s synthesis activities, the holding of a workshop on modeling and visualization, and a series of “immersion” workshops designed to introduce DCO researchers to immersive model visualization.

Funds from this grant provide two years of operational and research support to the Deep Life Community of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Led by US microbiologist Mitch Sogin and German biogeochemist Kai Hinrichs, the Deep Life Community is a global collaborative network of some 250 researchers working together to enhance our understanding of the nature, distribution, abundance, and limits of the deep biosphere. Funds from this grant will allow the Deep Life Community to conclude its research as the Deep Carbon Observatory approaches its planned conclusion in 2019, as well as begin integrative work to synthesize the community’s findings with the work of the larger DCO community. Grant funds will support the completion of three major sampling studies: one in mainland Oman, one in the Atlantis Massif on the north Atlantic seafloor, and one in the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan. Other funded research includes the completion of a “Census of Deep Life” that draws on deep life surveys of more than 90 locations worldwide. In addition, the Deep Life community continue laboratory studies of “extreme biophysics” that probe how biological molecules behave at high temperatures and pressures. Finally, the Deep Life Community will contribute several chapters to the technical volume that will summarize the entire body of DCO work and will contribute to the Deep Earth Carbon modeling initiative that provides integrative frameworks for the many faces of the DCO. The modeling has the exciting, maximal aim to predict the distribution of all deep life on Earth in space and time.

Funds from this grant provide two years of operational and research support to the Extreme Physics and Chemistry Community of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO). The Extreme Physics and Chemistry community is a global network of researchers working together to better our understanding of the physical and chemical properties of carbon in the high temperature, high pressure environments characteristic of the deep Earth. Led by geophysicist Wendy Mao of Stanford and geologist Craig Manning of UCLA, the community is concerned with the 90% of Earth’s carbon that resides in the interior as solids, magmas and melts, and low density fluids. It addresses the transformations that occur both as carbon rises from the core to the mantle to the crust and also as surface carbon is subducted beneath the crust and subjected to extraordinary temperatures and pressures. Grant funds will support research and administrative costs of the Extreme Chemistry community as it moves towards the planned conclusion of the DCO in 2019, with the majority of funds supporting a network of postdoctoral research associates at 20 participating institutions. Other funds support workshops, “hackathons,” and computational simulation and modeling work associated with integrating insights from the community with discoveries by the larger DCO community.

The grant provides two years of support to Deep Energy (DE) community of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Representing 176 researchers in 32 nations, the group is about half from the United States and half from the rest of the world, the Deep Energy Community is the branch of the DCO that examines the abundance, distribution, and origins of deep Earth abiotic hydrocarbons and the reactions between energy and rock that produce energy. Grant funds will provide research support to the community as it completes a set of eight initiatives on reduced carbon formation, the fate of reduced carbon, confined hydrogen behavior, isotopic bond ordering of methane, ocean floor serpentinization, Precambrian cratons, analysis of sediment cores taken from a drilling site in Oman, and monitoring of subsurface microbial activity rates. The last project, joint with the Deep Carbon Observatory’s Deep Life community, aims to determine how rapidly changes in subsurface metabolic activity occur in response to seismic events. (In plain words, earthquakes might cause deep microbial blooms.) Along with completing these studies, the DE community would carry out a range of activities to synthesize and integrate the component activities, including through the DCO’s collective effort to create a system of models of deep Earth carbon.

This grant continues support for two years for research conducted by the Reservoirs and Fluxes community of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Led by Marie Edmonds of Cambridge University and Erik Hauri of the Carnegie Institution for Science and comprising some 120 core members across the globe, the Reservoirs and Fluxes community is engaged in a coordinated research program to advance our understanding of the volume, distribution, and movement of Earth’s carbon. Major research goals include improving our knowledge of the global budget of fluxes of gases from volcanoes; learning about carbon in the mantle and its changes through time by studying the diamonds and their inclusions that were formed very deep; improving estimates of the global circulation of carbon in Earth’s interior and fluid dynamics of carbon; and improving knowledge of the chemical forms, mineral hosts, and reactions of carbon moving between reservoirs. The third and fourth activities are key for the DCO’s program-wide initiative to build a system of models simulating the origins and movements of deep carbon through Earth’s history, the paramount synthetic effort of the DCO, which could also be its greatest scientific legacy. The majority of grant funds provide partial support for each of about ten post-docs at six different institutions.